Bellamy's on thin ice, but that can happen in a tangled web

On 16 April, the celebrated media scientist, David Bellamy, published a letter in New Scientist magazine. Many of the world's glaciers, he claimed, 'are not shrinking but in fact are growing ... 555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, have been growing since 1980'.

Bellamy's letter was instantly taken up by climate change deniers (including lobbyists for the automobile industry). And it began to worry Guardian columnist, George Monbiot, who is a prominent environmental campaigner. What, he wondered, if Bellamy was right?

In a fascinating column, Monbiot recounts how he telephoned the World Glacier Monitoring Service and read Bellamy's letter to them. 'This is complete bullshit,' they told him, succinctly. They followed up with an email: 'Despite his scientific reputation,' it read, '[Bellamy] makes all the mistakes that are possible.' He had cited data that were simply false, failed to provide references, misunderstood the scientific context and neglected current scientific literature. The latest studies, the email went on, show unequivocally that most of the world's glaciers are retreating.

So where had Bellamy got his numbers from? Monbiot quizzed him by email. Eventually the biologist replied saying they had come from www.iceagenow.com - 'a website so bonkers,' says Monbiot, 'that I thought at first it was a spoof'. Me too: one only has to look at the background pattern and the way the text meanders all over the shop. But the site did indeed contain numbers vaguely similar to the ones Bellamy quoted. 'Since 1980,' it claimed, 'there has been an advance of more than 55 per cent of the 625 mountain glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring group in Zurich'. Note that figure of 55 per cent.

The source cited for this was 'the latest issue of 21st Century Science and Technology'. This leads to a website (www.21stcenturyscience-tech.com) which is a production of one Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche, an American political activist who leads political organisations in the United States and other countries. Wikipedia describes him as a 'perennial candidate' for President of the United States, having set a record for most consecutive attempts at the office by running eight times. A versatile soul, he has also done time in the slammer for conspiracy, mail fraud and tax code violations and is an Olympics-class conspiracy theorist.

LaRouche appears to have no scientific qualifications (he describes himself as an economist), but his publication has run numerous articles ridiculing, or purporting to refute, the notion of global warming. So as a source of data on that subject it ought to be treated with, er, caution.

Monbiot's quest (see www.monbiot.com) for the origin of Bellamy's statistic about glaciers goes on for quite a while after LaRouche and concludes that, in addition to being factually wrong, it also incorporates a typo: the errant statistic Bellamy was citing (55 per cent of 625 glaciers) had metamorphosed into 555 - which is what you get if you fail to hit the shift key when typing '55%'

All of which is by the way. What Monbiot's article illustrates most profoundly is the danger of believing something simply because it's been published on the web. Any fool can publish a website, and many fools do. Technophobes fasten upon this fact as conclusive proof that the web is pernicious. Better stick, they say, to stuff we know and trust - reference books, encyclopedias, library catalogues, etc.

This is a counsel of despair. It is also daft. In some important areas - particularly the dissemination of data - the world of print cannot compete with the web, partly because it has become the publication medium of choice for scientists, governments and policymakers. Just to take global warming as an illustration, there's a cornucopia of terrific resources - official, academic and activist - out there, and it would be difficult to keep up with the debate without them. To take another example - look at Hansard: once only those based in London (and with the ability to pay) had ready access to transcripts of parliamentary proceedings. Now Hansard is on the web, anyone can read them the day afterwards - for free.

The moral of George Monbiot's tale is not that people shouldn't use the web for research, but that they should be critical in their use of online resources. This is particularly important for schoolchildren, who are increasingly encouraged to use the web for research, but in general are not taught how to assess the credibility of a site.

If schools spent less time training kids on the use of PowerPoint and more time on teaching them to become sceptical users of online information, they would be less likely to fall for the codswallop that lured Bellamy to his professional doom.